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smoothness:^1 a quality so essential to beauty, that I do not now
recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth. In trees and
flowers, smooth leaves are beautiful; smooth slopes of earth in
gardens; smooth streams in the landscape; smooth coats of birds
and beasts in animal beauties; in fine women, smooth skins; and
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in several sorts of ornamental furniture, smooth and polished
surfaces. A very considerable part of the effect of beauty is owing
to this quality; indeed the most considerable. For, take any
beautiful object, and give it a broken and rugged surface; and
however well formed it may be in other respects, it pleases no
longer. Whereas, let it want ever so many of the other
constituents, if it wants not this, it becomes more pleasing than
almost all the others without it. This seems to me so evident, that
I am a good deal surprised, that none who have handled the
subject have made any mention of the quality of smoothness, in
the enumeration of those that go to the forming of beauty. For
indeed any ruggedness, any sudden projection, any sharp angle,
is in the highest degree contrary to that idea.
[Footnote 1: Part IV. sect. 21.]
Sect. XV.
Gradual Variation
[Footnote 1: Part IV. sect. 23.]
But as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular
parts, so their parts never continue long in the same right line.^1
They vary their direction every moment, and they change under
the eye by a deviation continually carrying on, but for whose
beginning or end you will find it difficult to ascertain a point. The
view of a beautiful bird will illustrate this observation. Here we
see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it
lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses
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itself in larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body,
when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new
direction; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again with
the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing, above,
below, upon every side. In this description I have before me the
idea of a dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of
beauty. It is smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that
expression) melted into one another; you are presented with no
sudden protuberance through the whole, and yet the whole is
continually changing. Observe that part of a beautiful woman
where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and
breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible
swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest
space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady
eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is
carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface,
continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms
one of the great constituents of beauty? It gives me no small
pleasure to find that I can strengthen my theory in this point, by
the opinion of the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth; whose idea of the
line of beauty I take in general to be extremely just. But the idea
of variation, without attending so accurately to the manner of the
variation, has led him to consider angular figures as beautiful:
these figures, it is true, vary greatly; yet they vary in a sudden
and broken manner; and I do not find any natural object which is
angular, and at the same time beautiful. Indeed few natural
objects are entirely angular. But I think those which approach the
most nearly to it are the ugliest. I must add too, that, so far as I
could observe of nature, though the varied line is that alone in
which complete beauty is found, yet there is no particular line
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which is always found in the most completely beautiful, and
which is therefore beautiful in preference to all other lines. At
least I never could observe it.
Sect. XVI.
Delicacy
An air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty.
An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost
essential to it. Whoever examines the vegetable or animal
creation will find this observation to be founded in nature. It is
not the oak, the ash, or the elm, or any of the robust trees of the
forest, which we consider as beautiful; they are awful and
majestic; they inspire a sort of reverence. It is the delicate myrtle,
it is the orange, it is the almond, it is the jasmine, it is the vine,
which we look on as vegetable beauties. It is the flowery species,
so remarkable for its weakness and momentary duration, that
gives us the liveliest idea of beauty and elegance. Among animals,
the greyhound is more beautiful than the mastiff; and the
delicacy of a gennet, a barb, or an Arabian horse, is much more
amiable than the strength and stability of some horses of war or
carriage. I need here say little of the fair sex, where I believe the
point will be easily allowed me. The beauty of women is
considerably owing to their weakness or delicacy, and is even
enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it. I
would not here be understood to say, that weakness betraying
very bad health has any share in beauty; but the ill effect of this
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